She came toward him, but he rose, still keeping his
hand in his pocket. “Wait a minute,”
he said, smiling. “Now it may give you
just a teeny bit of a shock, but the fact is—­well,
you remember that Sunday when Sibyl came over here
and made all that fuss about nothin’ —­it
was the day after I got tired o’ that statue
when Edith’s telegram came—­”

“Let me see your hand!” she cried.

“Now wait!” he said, laughing and pushing
her away with his left hand. “The truth
is, mamma, that I kind o’ slipped out on you
that morning, when you wasn’t lookin’,
and went down to ole Gurney’s office—­he’d
told me to, you see—­and, well, it doesn’t
amount to anything.” And he held
out, for her inspection, the mutilated hand.
“You see, these days when it’s all dictatin’,
anyhow, nobody’d mind just a couple o’—­”

He had to jump for her—­she went over backward.
For the second time in her life Mrs. Sheridan fainted.

CHAPTER XXXII

It was a full hour later when he left her lying upon
a couch in her own room, still lamenting intermittently,
though he assured her with heat that the “fuss”
she was making irked him far more than his physical
loss. He permitted her to think that he meant
to return directly to his office, but when he came
out to the open air he told the chauffeur in attendance
to await him in front of Mr. Vertrees’s house,
whither he himself proceeded on foot.

Mr. Vertrees had taken the sale of half of his worthless
stock as manna in the wilderness; it came from heaven—­by
what agency he did not particularly question.
The broker informed him that “parties were
interested in getting hold of the stock,” and
that later there might be a possible increase in the
value of the large amount retained by his client.
It might go “quite a ways up” within a
year or so, he said, and he advised “sitting
tight” with it. Mr. Vertrees went home
and prayed.

He rose from his knees feeling that he was surely
coming into his own again. It was more than
a mere gasp of temporary relief with him, and his
wife shared his optimism; but Mary would not let him
buy back her piano, and as for furs—­spring
was on the way, she said. But they paid the
butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker, and
hired a cook once more. It was this servitress
who opened the door for Sheridan and presently assured
him that Miss Vertrees would “be down.”

He was not the man to conceal admiration when he felt
it, and he flushed and beamed as Mary made her appearance,
almost upon the heels of the cook. She had a
look of apprehension for the first fraction of a second,
but it vanished at the sight of him, and its place
was taken in her eyes by a soft brilliance, while
color rushed in her cheeks.